Polyu Listed Among The Top 200 Universities In The World

PR Log (Press Release) – Oct 08, 2009 – The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has made a great leap forward in the "Times Higher Education-QS World University Ranking 2009" of the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES). It has moved up from the 224th place in 2008 to the 195th place in 2009 in the league table, and is now listed among the top 200 universities in the world.

In the sub-category of Subject Ranking by Engineering and Information Technology, PolyU is doing even better. It has leapfrogged from the 121st place to 91st place over the year, making it on the list of top 100 universities in the disciplines of engineering and information technology.

PolyU President Prof. Timothy W. Tong said this is another concrete proof that the University is committed to achieving academic excellence in a professional context. He also called on staff and students to keep up with their commendable efforts and scale new heights in the future. "The improved ranking also ties in well with our determination to increase our presence and impact on the world higher education stage," said Prof. Tong.

The THES rankings are based on six criteria, including: peer review carried out among academics, review of graduate recruiters, staff-to-student ratio, citations of academic papers, percentage of overseas staff and percentage of overseas students. With internationalization being a key strategic direction for coming years, PolyU is confident that it will achieve higher ranking in the near future.

"It is worth noting that PolyU is also offering some subjects such as design, textile and hotel management which are beyond the scope of assessment by the THES league table," Prof. Tong said.

PolyU School of Design was twice rated as one of the top 10 design schools in Asia by BusinessWeek in 2006 and 2007. More recently, its Master of Design (Design Strategies) programme has been rated among the world's top 30 best "design thinking programmes", according to a survey published in the BusinessWeek (2 October 2009).

The University's School of Hotel and Tourism Management is also a leading provider of hospitality education in the Asia-Pacific Region. It was ranked Number Four among the world's top hotel and tourism schools based on research and scholarship, according to a study published in the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Research in 2005.

Other independent surveys have also re-affirmed the strength of its faculty members. PolyU is the only university in Asia and Australia to cut a mark in the ranking of the top 50 business schools - its Faculty of Business was ranked 42nd for its finance and economics research by a study published in the Journal of Financial Economics (2009 September Issue). The rankings are based on the average research rankings provided by 11 previous studies over the period 1970-2001. The research productivity is based on 36 economics journals and the top five of the finance journals used by the earlier ranking studies.

In another league table, the Faculty of Business was ranked 66th in the world and Number Three in Asia, according to an independent ranking exercise by the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) based on research contribution in the 2004-2008 period.

In terms of engineering publication performance, PolyU is ranked 63rd in the world, according to the 2009 by fields Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities conducted by the Higher Education Evaluation and Accreditation Council of Taiwan. The ranking employs objective indicators that evaluate both quantity and quality of a university's scientific papers, and incorporates the assessment of long-term and short-term achievements in the composite measures. PolyU was ranked 72nd in the same league table last year.

PolyU also excels in civil engineering research output. In reviewing the number of papers published in leading journals from 2003 to 2005 in the field of civil engineering, PolyU was ranked number one in the world, according to an independent survey conducted by the Thomson Scientific, an established authority in compiling Science Citation Index.